As the discussion series has progressed, our goals for the presentations have evolved. In addition to generating discussion among researchers, we have come to recognize the value of the series as a means to refine our presentation skills. In light of this, here are some guidelines for creating your presentation:

When preparing your presentation, view this as a normal conference talk and prepare accordingly.

Please prepare a short (20-30 minute) talk or a long (45 minute) talk according to the time slot the organizer has reserved.

You should assume that the audience is knowledgeable in IR and many of the techniques commonly used in the field. Unless the purpose of your talk is a general overview of a research problem, you should assume that the related research can be covered very briefly (one or two slides).

Focus on presenting your thoughts, issues, and contributions to the problem at hand.

If you have extra material that won't fit in the talk, prepare slides for them as it is very likely that we will be willing to hear more about the subject after the main talk is over.

Please don't be afraid to present work in progress. Even with the change of presentation format to conference talk style , we are still driven by our original goals of learning about current research and fostering collaboration on work in progress.

The CMU-IR Discussion Series is a student-run initiative to encourage discussion and foster research between the multiple Information Retrieval research groups here at Carnegie Mellon. We intend the informal presentations to be a vehicle for:

learning about each others' research,

discussing the big (and little) problems of a research area, and

fostering collaboration across groups.

The presentations in this series are of an informal nature. Interruptions, questions, and discussions on tangents are encouraged and welcomed. We wish this to be a low-stress, relaxed opportunity for our presenters to discuss topics of interest with us. Our interpretation of the meaning of "information retrieval" is fairly broad; we welcome discussions of related fields (Machine Learning, Agents, Statistics, and so on). While most of the presentations are from students researching Information Retrieval here at CMU, we also welcome discussions from students and faculty in other programs and institutions as well as industry professionals.

One of the goals of the series is to strike a nice balance between area overview presentations and technical presentations on specific approaches. Because many of us work on quite different areas of Information Retrieval, we often find it beneficial to have discussions that focus on the important problems in our respective research areas and the techniques that have been found to be broadly useful (and occasionally the spectacular failures). In order to keep grounded, we also have some technical discussions on specific techniques and approaches.

In an effort to make this series a valuable resource for others, we plan on posting the authors' slides (with permission). We also ask that authors provide a short reading list of articles (preferably online) for people who want to learn about the topics in more depth.

For LTI students: a presentation in the IR Discussion Series can fulfill your annual LTI talk requirement. Let us know if you wish to do this more than a week in advance, so that we can advertise the talk according to policy. You will still be required to make sure two faculty are present and that they fill out the form after your presentation.